


Autumn Leaves

by MsBluebell



Series: Recovery [4]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Adoption, Amnesia, Discussion of Abortion, Gen, Hospitals, M/M, Minor Character Death, Not Canon Compliant, Parents As People, Past Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Regrets, Single Parents, Terminal Illnesses, parental abandonment, written before S5
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 15:35:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19276237
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MsBluebell/pseuds/MsBluebell
Summary: Like the season she was named after, Aki Shirogane’s life was never meant to last.





	Autumn Leaves

_Do you ever wonder if the stars shine out for you?_  
_Float down_  
_Like autumn leaves_  
_Hush now_  
_Close your eyes before the sleep_  
_And you're miles away_  
_And yesterday you were here with me_  
~ Autumn Leaves, Ed Sheeran

* * *

 

It starts with headaches.

No one notices at first, because Aki gets headaches all the time. She works in a café and deals with all sorts of tourist and annoying customers. Then she gets anxiety that messes with her head if she’s out of the house alone for too long, and she doesn’t like repeating things.

The point is, no one notices at first.

Sure, the headaches came more frequently, which was weird because she’s been better than she’s ever been before. Keith’s a teen and making A’s in his AP classes and looks like he’s got a bright future in the ballet circuit, Shiro has a successful and respectable career, and Aki’s been good enough with her money that she could probably retire early. She’s got no real problems she hasn’t been dealing with for over twenty years, and her kids are good, and everything is going great for her.

Sure, she couldn’t say she had any friends who knew where she was right now, and Baba had died over a year ago and left Aki’s social life in dust, but she’s close with her kids and basically living the dream life.

So she doesn’t notice at first.

* * *

She’s become a professional at braiding Keith’s hair.

He’s grown it out a bit since he started dancing. He likes to keep it long because he’s feminine enough to play female roles when it’s done up right, and masculine enough to play male roles when it’s out of the way.

Keith’s won a whole shelf of awards from his dancing, and he’s got his eye on a dance school that sure to get him on a fast track to becoming a professional on the New York circuit. He’s stuck between it and joining Shrio at the Garrison, wanting to see the stars with his brother, but Aki knows Keith well enough to see where his heart leans.

* * *

There’s a part of her that feels smug whenever she looked at Shiro.

She can remember, clear as day, waking up in the hospital after everything that happened with Johnny. The skin around her right wrist pealed away, a bandage over the horrific wound. There are bruises all over her body, and they had to remove glass from deep in her flesh were the getaway car crashed.

They don’t tell her if the man who saved her survived, probably one of only a handful of people who gave a shit about her, instead they call her fucking parents. The one’s she hadn’t seen since she’d been kicked out.

Those fuckers walk into the hospital room, their noses turned up in the air, and her mother looks particularly disapproving as she examines her used and abused daughter laying in the hospital bed, “This never would have happened if you’d listened to us.”

“This never would have happened if you hadn’t kicked me out.” She had snapped back defensively, because that's all she knew how to do anymore. She'd been used up, fresh from hell, and so tried she could have died. Her man left fresh bruises on her skin, and more than a few in her head. She doesn't think she's ever quite recovered from what he'd done to her. She knows she hasn't, actually, and she knows the poison is still fresh within her.

Then the hospital drops the bomb on her, and she finds out she’s pregnant in that awful hospital room, strapped down like she’d been for weeks, with stiches all down her, missing skin, and vaginal trauma that makes it hard to move.

She’s so tired and disillusioned by this point that she can’t even be surprised.

Her mother huffed with heavy disapproval, “We’ll have to get rid of it before anyone finds out about this,or you'll never marry.”

“I’m not just going to get rid of it.” She bites back, tired and confused, and more than ready to kick the two unwelcome guests out of her room, “We’re not going to just pretend this never happened. Convenient as that would be for you.”

The conversation devolved after that, ending up with the police being forced to escort her parents out while the newly traumatized witness demanded a restraining order against the two. And suddenly there’s a homeless, jobless, pregnant Asian girl with nowhere to go and no one to turn to stuck in the hospital. She’s the only witness that can get Johnny off the streets now, and they offer her a spot in witness protection if she testifies.

She doesn’t know what else to do, so she says yes.

* * *

The nausea comes next.

Aki worries a bit more about that, but doesn’t think too much about it. She’s felt nausea before, when she thinks of Johnny, or what could have happened to Keith if she never found him, or handcuffs. She’s thrown up before because she saw a man with the same haircut as Johnny in the market and she felt hands holding her down all over again.

So, yeah, she doesn’t question the nausea too much. It’s weird, but she thinks that it must be because something is triggering her and making her feel uneasy.

* * *

Aki has spent the time she’s been raising Keith collecting photographs to go into an album next to pictures she’s taken of Shiro over the years.

She hasn’t told either of them this, but she’s collected every drawing and printed every picture to put into her album. She dates every one of them with different colored pens and stickers.

She likes to think of it as collecting memories, and she’s saving this book for the grandkids that Shiro and Keith better give her, because grandma is a title that she thinks she would like. So every time there’s a new picture she posts on online there’s also colored paper and gel pens drawing lines of ivy and stickers of silly things holding them down.

* * *

Aki bought a video camera about nine months after Shiro was born. After she’d finally started getting herself together enough to be a real, if flawed, mother rather than the broken mess barely getting by taking care of herself and a kid she’d been the first few months.

She has hundreds of micro cards filled with videos of Shiro’s first steps and first Halloween. She’d caught every contest and sporting event. She’d gotten him walking out during his prom and homecoming. She’d gotten every Christmas, and learning to ride a bike, and learning to drive. Everything she could think of, from his first day at preschool to his graduation, she’d gotten it all and labeled every card.

When Keith becomes more comfortable she starts breaking out the camera and grabbing the book collected these cards in and making her new son his own section. Obviously, she can’t catch his first step or his first day at preschool, but she definitely catches every ballet recital and their first Christmas together with every holiday that comes after  
She’s going to show these to her grandkids one day, when they ask about their parents. Or maybe watch them when she’s old and retired.

* * *

“Aki?’ Keith looks up at her from his dinner plate about a two months after she started noticing the nausea, “Why aren’t you eating anymore?”

“What are you talking about sweetie?” Aki hummed, taking a sip of her coffee. It’s true, she hadn’t touched much on the plate, but it’s not like she just stopped eating or anything.

“You haven’t been eating any of your dinner lately.” Keith hums, worried, the sweet boy.

“That can’t be right.” Aki rolls her eyes back, trying to think of the last time she’d finished her food, “We ate sandwiches for dinner last night.”

Keith’s brow knit together, his face twisted into that one look Aki knew meant he was worried. His long hair is pinned up into a bun, and it gives her a clear view of his face. She doesn’t like worrying him, he’s only fifteen and he shouldn’t be worried about her.

He’s worried anyway.

“Aki…” Keith starts carefully, placing down his fork carefully, “…that was a week ago.”

Aki frowns, “No, that can’t be right…”

She tries to remember more clearly, but she can’t remember what happened last night.

* * *

Before she found out what Johnny did for a living and their relationship went south, she honestly thought a lot about what she would name her kids if she had them with him. She wasn’t thinking of jumping the gun and marrying the guy right away, but the thought had hit her.

Johnny had a funny family history, he was half Swedish from his father and half Japanese from his mother and all the way strange. He hated being Japanese, resented it deeply, and so did she, so she had been pretty confident that any children they had would have Swedish names.

It’s not until later, until she’s handcuffed to the bedframe of his massive bed, bruises decorating her body, and uniformed in lingerie that she decides she hates the idea.

Johnny is brushing a callused thumb over her freshly busted lip, laying propped on an elbow between her legs, looking up at her like she’s the most beautiful thing in the world, “I think it’s time to start thinking about kids.”

It doesn’t take him long to think of a name, “I’m thinking Sven if it’s a boy. What do you think darling?”

“I like Sven.” She nods.

She hates the name.

* * *

After Baba died, Aki had to take over as sole owner of the café. She had to hire another person to do the cooking, but everything was going alright for the most part. She was able to keep things afloat for the most part, and her employees seemed to like her for the most part.

It’s hard without Baba here, because she was the one who helped pick Aki up and get her together when she first moved to New Orleans after escaping Johnny, but time goes on and so does Aki.

She still runs the finances, putting her degree to use, and making the drinks. The job isn’t as fulfilling as it used to be, but she’s still happy with the easy smell of cake and coffee.

It’s also at the café when Aki had to stop making excuses.

She was in the middle of making an Americano when the seizure hit. She can’t remember what happened, exactly, but she know that she was carried away in the back of an ambulance, rolled away on a stretcher as her employees were forced to try and keep everything together.

* * *

The hospital is a painfully familiar place, and Aki comes to from a coma with mild panic as she wakes up to white walls and the familiar rhythm of her heartbeat.

Shiro is there, which worries her because that meant he had to call off work and rush to Louisiana from Texas, and seated onto a chair next to her hospital bed. He’s sleeping, leaning against one hand and breathing evenly.

Aki groans, trying to lean up, but her head shoots with an pain that felt like someone took a hot knife through her skull. She screams, startling Shiro out of his sleep, making him jump and send the chair crashing to the floor, “Mom!”

Keith comes rushing out of the hospital bathroom, his violet eyes blown wide, face paling as he watched her squirm on the bed.

Her heart monitor goes off rapidly, beep-beep-beeping away in her ear as her skull grinds against her brain, everything twisting painfully. She clutching her head, trying not to make a sound, and everything hurts.

A doctor rushes in, or maybe a nurse, she couldn’t tell. Either way she finds herself being held down and doped up with something that knocks her out in a second.

* * *

They find out what’s wrong with her while she unconscious, which means she gets to wake up to Shiro and Keith’s worried faces. Keith looks so /broken/ when she wakes up that she knows it can’t be good news even before she hears anything, and Shiro looks like he’s barely holding himself together, only keeping from a breakdown because Keith is there and he has to be strong.

The doctor breaks the news to her.

Glioblastoma.

 _Fucking Glioblastoma_.

 _The_  most aggressive brain cancer Satan ever could have shit out of his ass and into her head.

No one knew what had caused it, apparently a common problem with Glioblastoma, and Aki knew the moment they showed her the tumor growing in her head that she was screwed.

It’s very hard to treat Glioblastoma, the doctor tells them in a sympathetic voice, because there were several complicating factors. The tumor cells are _very_  resistant to conventional therapies, the brain is really easy to damage, the brain has a limited ability to repair itself, and any drugs they could have given her can’t pass the blood-brain barrier to fight the tumor.

The typical length of survival for patients diagnosed is about twelve, maybe fifteen, months with treatment. Life expectancy without treatment is about three months.  
Keith, normally a realist, asks if there’s _anything_  they can do to save her. He doesn’t look hopeful, but he asks anyway and that says a lot.

The doctor winches, “There are symptomatic and palliative therapies we can try, but they’re expensive and painful.”

Story of her life.

* * *

It becomes pretty clear she can’t go back to work after this, and it’s only Keith and her at home with no one else to help take care of her, so Shiro puts in transfer requests for her to be moved to a hospital not far from his apartment in the Texas desert.

Aki tries to fight it, brings up the café, and Keith’s school, and the house, and Keith’s work at the theater.

Keith is the one to cut through all her arguments.

“It’s okay Aki.” Keith shrugs, trying to look nonchalant, “I was thinking about joining the Garrison anyway.”

Aki knows it’s bullshit the moment it leaves his mouth, because he’d been _so proud_  of his performances in the theater, and he’d been showing off the scholarship to that dance school he wanted to attend for months, and he had awards lining the shelves proudly beside his artwork and photographs.

Aki has the decency to wait until he leaves the room to start crying.

* * *

Aki finds herself moving straight from the hospital to hospital, unable to even help pack up the house with her boys.

“Don’t worry mom.” Shiro smiles reassuringly at her, the bags under his eyes darker and heavier than they’ve ever been, “I’ve hired some movers to help us.”

She can’t help but hate every piece of herself, but she cracks a smile and tries to keep up good humor, because she’s starting to realize that _someone_  has to, “Make sure you get all my books. I won’t forgive you if you forget _any_  of my books. You know how much I love Tolkien.”

Shiro smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes, “I will.”

* * *

Back before she was Aki, her name was Kyoko.

Sometimes she wonders if her parents named her that on purpose. If they looked at the meaning behind the name and gifted her with it in an attempt to seal her with the fate they wanted, to make her the perfect mirror, a reelection of everything they thought she was.

She’s not sure why she picked the name Aki for herself when she changed her name, but now that she’s had years to think about it, she thinks it fits her better than Kyoko ever did. She’s been Aki for longer than she was ever Kyoko now, and Aki feels more real than Kyoko ever did.

Kyoko had been a silly girl, but Aki was wiser and full of grit. Sometimes the woman will look back, dare to peek back at Kyoko’s life and she’s always surprised to see someone she could never recognize.

It’s the memory of Kyoko that helped Aki decide on a name for her son when he was born. She names him Takashi, after everything her parents never where, everything his father wasn’t, and everything she hoped Aki would be.

* * *

The move to the next hospital is spent in the back of her car, Shiro at the wheel, her home behind her with a ‘For Sale’ sign and all her stuff crammed in the back of moving vans, most of it will be going into storage once they reach the proper Texas town a few miles off from the Garrison. Aki and Keith will be set up in the guest room in Shiro’s small, two room, apartment.

It’s fair enough, they’ll set up her bed in there and move out the smaller one he already had. She and Keith would share, for the most part, but there would be nights she’d have to sleep in the hospital.

Aki studies her new home with an uncritical eye. It’s not the home she painstakingly cultivated before, but it would do. At least they were all together, that’s what counted.

* * *

Shiro helps Keith set up his admission into school.

It might be the only alone time Aki will spend it her new home for a while, so she gets onto the laptop and starts looking up things that her boys can do with her body once she dies. She likes to think she’s being pragmatic considering her very slim chances of making it out of this mess, and she’s a realist if nothing else.

Cremation is something she definitely wants. She’s going to donate what parts of her body she can and then have the rest burned. Now she just needs to figure out what she wants done with those ashes. Shiro would probably buy her a tombstone no matter what she did, but she wanted something better for the ashes.

Turns out there are a lot of cool things you could do with cremated ashes. You could have them made into stain glass, hardened into diamonds, shot out into fireworks, made into a coral reef, planted into a tree, made into an hourglass. All sorts of things are available.

She’s not sure which one she likes best, so just to fuck with Shiro she writes all the most interesting options down in her newly written will and tells him to figure it out. She hopes she gets a laugh out of it.

She sneaks out to a law office and updates her Last Will and Testament, handing over her handwritten letter to be opened with it after her funeral.

It’s all she can do to help.

* * *

When Shiro was born, and she wasn’t alright, but she had this one lullaby she would sing to him to get him to stop crying. Sometimes it would be the only thing that kept the small, pinkish, babe from crying all night long and keeping her up.

‘ _And even though we ain't got money_  
_I'm so in love with you honey_  
_And everything will bring a chain of love_  
_And in the mornin' when I rise_  
_Bring a tear of joy to my eyes_  
_And tell me everything is gonna be alright.’_

She used to sing it all the time to the babe, right into his boyhood when he starting getting older and didn’t want mama’s lullaby’s anymore. Aki wonders if he remembers the song at all. She does.

* * *

Keith looks adorable in his Junior Cadet uniform.

Aki only needs to take one look at his little cheeks and his puffy face in that uniform before she’s pulling out the camera and dedicating a whole page of her scrapbook to it. She’s a gushing mess, and she’s proud of Keith even if the boy was forced to give up his dancing for this.

Keith looks a lot happier wearing the uniform after she started gushing about it. His chest huffs up in pride, and his eyes light up in a way she hadn’t seen since before they got the news of her diagnosis.

“Better watch out Shiro.” Aki preens, hands on both of Keith’s shoulders, “You’ve got competition coming. Keith will catch up to you in no time, and then you’ll both be traveling the stars together.”

“I can only hope.” Shiro smiles.

* * *

Her memory is shot more and more often as the days go one, and it’s starting to get harder and harder to remember things that happened the day before.

So far it hadn’t been too bad, just a couple of forgotten dinner plans here and there, the occasional forgetting of object placements, and that one time she forgot to put on shoes before she left the house. Overall, though, it’s not to bad.

It’s not until Keith cracks a joke that she realizes that things might be worse off than she realized.

“At least I’m not Feanor.” Keith snickers over a spilled plate of spaghetti, laughing with wrinkles around his eyes and a bright smile on his face. Shiro has his own fond smile, moving to help Keith clean up the mess.

“Who the fuck is Feanor?” Aki asks, trying to remember where she’d heard the name before, but she can’t remember for shit.

The horrified looks Keith and Shiro give her make her think that forgetting who Feanor is was a bad, _bad_ , sign.

* * *

Aki doesn’t cry in front of her kids. She tries her damn best not to show how scared she is, because her boys are scared witless and are growing bags under their eyes. Forgetting Feanor put the fear of God into them, and she doesn’t think either of them have gotten a good nights sleep since.

She’s spending more and more time in the hospital these days, and her body is growing weaker and weak every day.

It’s only when the boy are charted off from her room, forced to leave her so they can rest and leave for their classes or whatever that Aki lets the stress and fear wash over her, and the tears start to fall.

* * *

Sometimes Aki wonders if Johnny is still alive.

He was in prison, last she checked, locked so tightly that he would never get out. That’s what happened to people like Johnny, they got locked up in jails and become big names behind bars. She could easily imagine he became some kind of top dog in the prison he was in, ruling as the fucking king behind those bars.

She wonders if he ever tried to pay someone off to find her, to kill her. She wonders if he thinks about her or if he’s moved on. Aki can’t imagine a world where Johnny wasn’t obsessed with Kyoko, and she’s sickened by the idea that he may love Aki more than he ever loved the girl she was before. Johnny’s love was obsessive and all consuming, sick and twisted and evolving.

He probably did still love her, or at least thought he did. His love was Mania, and Aki couldn’t see him letting go.

If one good thing comes of her death, it’s that she’ll die having never seen Johnny again.

* * *

One day, when her body is too weak for anything other than laying in the bed, Aki calls her parents for the first time in over twenty years. She hates them, oh, she hates them, but she’ll be damned if she doesn’t at least tell them their only child is dying.

They don’t pick up.

“It’s Kyoko.” She tells the answering machine, “Or…well…not anymore. I haven’t been Kyoko for a long time. I just called to let you know I have cancer. Glioblastoma. I’ve only got a few months left at best. Just thought you should know, just in case.”

She hangs up with that, deflated, but hoping that something would come of her call.

Nothing ever does though, not that she’s surprised.

* * *

Aki feels like she’s loosing her kids more and more everyday.

Not only are Shiro and Keith becoming more and more stressed every day her death gets closer, but they’re often at school, or she’s in the hospital, and she’s loosing more and more memory of them. The fact that she’s so close to death, and so far from what she’s always wanted, kills her inside.

Her boys come to visit her every day, or try their best to make her final days comfortable and loved, but all she can see are the bags under their eyes growing more and more.

She hates herself more and more each day.

* * *

Nine months after she’s diagnosed Aki finally lies down and admits she’s never leaving the hospital again.

She can’t move her hands anymore, or maybe she just forgot how, or maybe she just lost the will. Her body won’t move, and she finds herself laying in the stiff bed in the bleached room and the to clean walls. The nurses always have movies play, streaming from a cloud of Aki’s personal collection. They’re trying to make her last days enjoyable, she thinks, but it’s really impossible at this point.

They’re extra nice to her, the nurses. Nurses are supposed to be nice, it’s their job to pretend to be nice, like costumer service with a medical degree, but for her case they’re trying extra hard. They pity her, because she’s a bit younger than normal, and she has the worst cancer she can reasonably thing of, and her boys come in as often as they can. Keith’s not even out of middle school, and Shiro may be grown but he’s also young. Then they notice that there’s no spouse, and the pity grows all the more.

So, yeah, the nurses are nice to her.

* * *

When Kyoko was small, she had two cousins.

Aki isn’t sure who Kyoko is, not really, but she remembers there was a girl named Kyoko that she used to know, and that girl had two cousins. One boy and one girl. Their parents died too, and they were sent away into the system and she never saw them again.

She doesn’t know what happened to them, but she suspects maybe her parents used all their money to track down the girl and have her take Kyoko’s place. A new and better Kyoko. Aki had looked into it once, she thinks, and that seemed like it was what happened. She can’t remember why she looked into it in the first place, because the drama rich people get into isn’t any of her business, but she did.

Wait, no, she looked into it because of Kyoko, the real Kyoko.

She hopes the real Kyoko is okay, wherever she is.

* * *

Her sons come to visit her at least once a week.

The withered woman almost wishes they wouldn’t. She’s a pitiful sight, hooked up to more tubes than she can remember to count, and thinner than she’s ever been. The Garrison doesn’t give them many days off, and they’re wasting what little time they have here.

Shiro tells her about little things in his life. He has a boyfriend now, and he’s confident this time it’s going to work out. That’s nice, she thinks, but it’s too bad she’ll never meet him. It’s been about ten months, and she’s not presentable enough to meet a guy her son might marry someday.

There’s a nagging feeling in her brain. There was something she thinks she should tell him, something important, about dating. Some kind of truth. She never told him before, but she thinks she should. She can’t remember though, it’s gone from her head before she can even guess what it was. With a sigh of resignation she lets it go. It’s something she’s become good at lately, letting go.

Keith is sitting in the chair next to her, chin resting on his knees, a green book clutched in his hands. He doesn’t speak until Shiro nudges him, encouraging him to tell her about his day and how he's best in his class. Keith is slower, more shy, a little closed off. He’s scared, she thinks, of losing her. He’s lost a lot in his short life, a mother that walked out on him and a father that burned alive. Too many foster siblings were taken from him, or left him behind. Too many foster families decided the couldn’t handle him. Now he’s losing her too.

She hates them.

She hates all of them.

But she hates his mother the most, because what good reason could anyone possibly have for leaving him? This innocent and good boy she'd found ready to jump off a bridge, too mature and too responsible for his age, already in charge of taking care of another life. She hates that woman for leaving him.

She’s not sure if she means his birth mother or not.

* * *

  
“Keith.” She whispers to him on one of those rare nights he says over to read to her. He looks up from the book violet, inhuman, eyes staring at her, sentence breaking off from the story about strangest dwarves and their adventures into an inquisitive hum.

She shakes her head weakly, staring at the dark roof, decorated in little plastic stars by her boys. Her eyes leak as she stares into those stars, dotting the sky like little wishes for her to get well again. She knows she won’t, can’t, but she wishes on every one of those stars that she could, for them. Her boys…

The tears leak from her eyes and her voice breaks as she whispers, “I wish I was your real mom.”

Keith chokes next to her, and she thinks Shiro must be here, because she hears him inhale too. Strange, she doesn’t remember him being here, but he must be. It doesn’t matter, it’s not his tiny hand that grabs hers. Small but strong fingers squeeze hers, “You are.”

“Really?” She shakes her head, “I must have forgot.”

“You’re my mom.” Keith’s little voice cracks, his grip iron tight around her hand, “You’re my mom.”

“I’m sorry I forgot.” Aki apologizes, because it was stupid of her to have forgotten something like that. Here she was, hating someone that didn’t exist. Or maybe she hated herself? She can’t remember anymore. She thought Keith’s mom was a different woman, but it must have been a mistake. Her head isn’t right these days. "I'm sorry I left you."

“It’s okay.” Keith comforts, patting her hand. “You…you didn’t mean to.”

“I’ll be a better mom next time.” She promises, and she really means it, “To both of you. I’m going to be a better mom. I’m gonna be your mom again, but better. And…and…it’s going to be great. I’ll…I’ll tell you that thing…that…I won’t forget. And I’ll be a good mom, next time.”

“Kaa-chan.” She thinks she hears Shiro's voice break as he takes her other hand, “You…you were a good mom.”

“Maybe.” She licks her too dry lips, “But I’ll be better next time. I promise.”

* * *

Aki dies the way autumn always does.

It's a sum of her life, really, that she should pass in such an unremarkable way. She was a woman with an unremarkable life, no great importance to the narrative, no grand contribution to the universe at large. She excelled in little things, slow things, like a cool breeze in summer, or hot coffee in the mornings. Aki was made of small moments, and she has an end that fits that. It’s not complicated, or dramatic. She passes quietly, like a leaf in the wind, she blows by with a short breath and a promise on her lips. It’s a hushed thing, with no room for begging or crying, not for her anyway. She simply closes her eyes and sleeps, breath stopping shortly after, and her heart in both hands.

**Author's Note:**

> So I finally finished this series....after...like...a year. Sorry about that guys! Ha, a lot of this is harsher in hindsight after the rest of the series.


End file.
